I was out mowing one afternoon when I spotted a shiny object in the neighbors’ small garden.

It reflected off the sun, probably to ward off the many woodland creatures who frequent my neck of the woods.

Now I had an idea what the shiny object was and made a mental note to check it out once I finished mowing.

Well, mental notes for me aren’t worth much. Two days later, while doing something totally unrelated, I thought about the object and went out to investigate.

Sure enough, I was right. The garden reflector turned out to be an old laserdisc.

Before you go running to Wikipedia, I can tell you laserdisc is the granddaddy of today’s DVDs.

These buggers were big, roughly the size of a long-playing record (come on, you have to know what that is) but silver, like a DVD. It looks like an oversized DVD.

From 1978 to about 1998, most of us watched our movies on grainy VHS or maybe Beta video recorders. If you were a rich videophile (that’s somebody who likes video stuff) you watched your movies on pristine laserdiscs.

They looked a lot like today’s DVDs and included chapters, special features, audio commentaries, all of the stuff we take for granted today.

In fact, I rented an early version of “Clerks” on DVD and in the audio commentary, the speaker talked about what can be seen on this “laserdisc.” So material was being pulled off laserdisc and placed on the new DVD format.

So why did laserdisc fail? It looked better than VHS, but when it was discontinued in 2001, only two million units had been sold in the United States after 23 years!

The machines started at $400 and if you wanted a fancier one that didn’t require that you get up and flip the movie over after an hour, it would cost you closer to $1,000. You can see why it didn’t catch on.

Laserdisc is one of many products that bombed. The most recent is HD-DVD, a hybrid DVD format designed to look really sharp on high-definition televisions. It was in a battle with another format, Blu-Ray, and lost.

As long ago as 1980 people worried that we were sending our manufacturing overseas, creating a void for American jobs. RCA had an answer, its own movie disc system it called CED, or Capacitance Electronic Disc. This was touted as important because the machines were manufactured in the U.S., while VCRs and laserdisc machines were predominately built in Japan.

These discs played with a needle, sort of a phonograph with sound and picture. The first letterboxed movies were on CED. A month before the whole system went belly-up in 1984, CED came out with a stereo version.